Ver Brugge Foods butcher shop at 6231 College Avenue in Oakland. Photo of butcher, Darius Koski, showing a customer some meat product. This is a view looking through the front windows of the shop.
Photo by Craig Lee/San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: CRAIG LEE

Ver Brugge Foods butcher shop at 6231 College Avenue in Oakland....

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Ver Brugge Foods butcher shop at 6231 College Avenue in Oakland. Photo of shop owner, Jerry Brugge (right) talking to Traci Siegel (left) about what she wants. Traci is a regular customer as many there are.
Photo by Craig Lee/San Francisco Chronicle

Photo: CRAIG LEE

Ver Brugge Foods butcher shop at 6231 College Avenue in Oakland....

Image 3 of 3

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Photo: CRAIG LEE

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Little shop on the corner / Artisan butchers hand out advice and recipes along with quality meat

In the front window of Schaub's meat market in Palo Alto, below the awards and the antique hand-cranked sausage stuffer, is an old hot plate.

As a boy attending St. Mary's grammar school in Los Gatos, shop owner David Schaub, 52, would leave school for lunch and walk across the street to his father Fred's butcher shop. Inside, his father would have a meal simmering for him on the hot plate - slices of filet mignon, pot roast, braised oxtails. The aroma filled the butcher shop and drove customers crazy.

In time, Schaub's father taught him the meat trade.

The hot plate and Schaub's market itself are links to a faded but enduring Bay Area tradition: the neighborhood butcher shop. As a fourth-generation butcher, Schaub's roots in the business run deep.

"It's kind of a personal thing," he said, describing the window display. "My father meant a lot to me and (the hot plate) reminds me of how good things were."

Before the rise of homogenous supermarket chains and cellophane-wrapped, self-service meat, independently owned butcher shops were as common as video rental stores are now. Today, only a handful of the family-run shops are left. San Francisco has the highest concentration, with shops like Little City, Bryan's, Drewes and Guerra scattered across the city. Other Bay Area shops include Ver Brugge in Oakland; Lawrence's in Alamo; and another Bryan's in San Anselmo.

There's something special about stepping into one of these tile-floored halls of meat. You're served by efficient and knowledgeable men (they're almost always men) wearing knobby ties peaking out from their whites smocks. There's a faint, metallic tang of meat and steel in the air. Band saws whine as butchers break large pieces of beef down to size. Rows of almost every cut of meat fill gleaming display cases.

If you want a special cut for something like shabu-shabu or a daube, these butchers know what you need and will cut it to order for you. Unlike most supermarkets, many independent butcher shops sell prime and choice grade beef, the first- and second-tier cuts of meat.

Schaub opened his store in the Stanford Shopping Center 14 years ago. Before that, he ran the market in Los Gatos, taking over from his father. His family's experience in the meat business stretches back to the 1700s in Germany, and Schaub is the direct recipient of that line of knowledge.

A big man with a soft voice, Schaub eats and sleeps his work. Literally. He once dreamed of a recipe for tomato and basil sausage, the only sausage recipe he's ever invented that he got right the first time he made it.

"I was laying there in bed one night and I could actually smell it cooking, " he says.

His store specializes in dry-aged beef, 35 types of housemade sausage and a unique, marinated bottom sirloin steak called "Fred's" after his father. The closely guarded recipe turns the meat coal black and is a top-seller.

"My dad always said you have to give customers something they can't get somewhere else," he says. "There's always going to be someone who requires that extra something."

There are few newcomers to the Bay Area's meat business. Most are multi- generational, family-run shops. In addition to offering that extra something, the butchers are steeped in the skills of a trade short on new recruits.

"It's kind of a dying art," said Ron Spinali, longtime owner of San Francisco's Little City Market in North Beach.

Many of the city's butcher shops have closed because of rising rents, competition from supermarkets and the ever-shrinking supply of skilled butchers, but Spinali says Little City has survived by catering to the neighborhood. That means lots of veal and Sicilian-style sausage. He hands out advice and recipes for many of the cuts he sells.

"I think what an independent butcher does is give you the opportunity to have your food turn out right," Spinali said.

The market has been in business for 60 years, 50 of them at the current Stockton Street location. Spinali's father George started the business and he passed it on to his son. Now Spinali works for his son, Michael. "It's his shop now," Spinali says.

Some might call another butcher shop, Bryan's on California Street in San Francisco, a food-lover's paradise. In addition to a huge variety of meats including American Kobe beef, Sonoma County lamb, organic poultry and fresh fish, the market prepares dishes like beef Burgundy and grilled flank steak every day. Opposite the meat counter are specialty cheeses and fresh vegetables. If you've got the wallet for it, the market also sells several grades of Russian caviar. But meat is the main attraction.

Co-owner Peter Flannery takes particular pride in the fact that Bryan's beef is dry-aged for as long as 30 days, a time-consuming technique that produces incredibly tender meat.

"It's the old-fashioned way," he says. "It's been working for 67 years and there's no reason to change now."

What you won't find at his shop or at many others is grass-fed beef. Many old-school butchers like Flannery say they don't like the taste and that it costs more than customers are willing to pay. But he says he buys his traditional beef from smaller-scale purveyors and can vouch for its quality.

Bryan's is named after Flannery's father. The elder Flannery, who ran the meat counter at nearby Cal-Mart for many years, started in the meat business in the 1930s at Grant Market on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. Before Grant Market closed in 1968, it was the city's premier meat market. From behind a 60-foot marble counter dozens of butchers were busy selling much of the meat by the piece rather than by weight. A framed black-and-white photo of the market with its approximately 50-person crew standing in front hangs behind the counter at Bryan's.

Across the bay in Oakland, Ver Brugge Foods traces its roots back to Grant Market, too.

Owner Jerry Ver Brugge has a photograph of the old market but his features his father Bill's lavish window display, a cornucopia of meat he arranged each day to lure shoppers off Market Street. His father later opened his own store on 24th Street in Noe Valley where a young Ver Brugge earned his chops in the 1950s.

"Back then there were probably four shops within four blocks of each other, " he recalls.

After taking over his father's shop years later, he moved on to open his own store in Rockridge in 1979. When he began, the area was not the strip of boutiques and coffee shops it is now. Still, he says, "We're a neighborhood business. We have fun with our customers. We know their children. We know their dogs."

A good product helps, too. The market slices its own bacon, smokes its own trout and churns out dozens of sausage varieties. They grind veal, lamb and pork each day. The store also has an extensive selection of fish and poultry. And what they don't have they can get.

"If you call me by 8 o'clock, I could get it for you by noon," Ver Brugge says.

High rents and chain-store competition have pushed many butcher stores out of business, he said, but with the Bay Area's ever-growing love affair with food, butcher shops, like specialty bakers, cheese sellers, and wine merchants,

have reestablished their niches.

"I think that's on the rise," he says. "The butcher shops that have survived are going to last."

ONE-STOP SHOPPING

While not all have the family traditions and longevity of the Bay Area's remaining independent butcher shops, some grocery stores feature first-rate butcher shops inside. They make for easy one-stop shopping.

These stores include Consentino's three locations in Santa Clara County, Roberts Market in Woodside, the out-of-the-way Corralitos Sausage Co. in Santa Cruz County, three locations of Draeger's on the Peninsula, and various Bay Area locations of Lunardi's, Andronico's, Whole Foods and Mollie Stone's markets.

In San Francisco, Cal-Mart and Viglizzo's Tower Market have family-run butcher shops inside. Antonelli's, located inside Cal-Mart, has been in business since the mid-1960s and features antibiotic- and hormone-free beef and specialty items like venison and "turducken" -- a turkey stuffed with a whole duck, chicken, squab and Cornish game hen.

The biggest advantage to being a store within a store?

"Foot traffic," says Dominic Antonelli, who took over the business from his father and owns the shop with his brother. Antonelli's sons work at the shop, too.

While the pressure on stand-alone shops is keen, Antonelli doubts other butcher shops will seek safe harbors in grocery stores. Supermarket chains run their own meat departments and the remaining solo butcher shops aren't likely to relocate, he says.

SCHAUB'S BRAISED OXTAILS

Schaub's recommends serving this with mashed potatoes and green peas and baby carrots.

Ingredients: 4 pounds oxtails, separated at the joints

4 tablespoons flour

Salt and pepper to taste

4 tablespoons olive oil

2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped

3 celery stalks, coarsely chopped

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 cups dry red wine

3 bay leaves

2 sprigs of fresh thyme

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 cups beef stock or broth

1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

INSTRUCTIONS: Rinse the oxtails in cold water and pat dry with paper towels.

Combine the flour, salt and pepper in a plastic bag. Then add the oxtails a few at a time, and shake until all pieces are dusted with flour. Shake off excess flour.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the oxtails and brown on all sides. As the oxtails brown, transfer them to a Dutch oven.

When all the oxtails have been browned, add the onions, celery and garlic to the skillet. Saute until soft, stirring occasionally.

Increase the heat and add wine, stirring to deglaze. Then add bay leaves, thyme, tomato paste and stock. Bring to a boil and cook until reduced by one third. Pour over the oxtails in the Dutch oven. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for approximately 3 1/2 hours. Make sure the liquid is barely bubbling.

When the meat is tender and almost falling off the bones, transfer the oxtails with a slotted spoon to a serving dish. Discard the bay leaves and thyme sprigs. Skim off excess fat. Bring to a boil, then cook until slightly reduced.

Mix the cornstarch with an equal amount of water and stir into the sauce; simmer, stirring, until thickened. Pour over the oxtails.